The ramblings of Eric J. Gruber

Monthly Archives: July 2010

Way before the days of social media, we bumped into each other online and started IM’d each other (do people still do that?) for more than a year. She was living in Topeka at the time – and had a boyfriend – but we because friends and chatted from time to time as kind of online pen pals.

But I got busy. I moved in with three crazy guys, and we lost touch for a bit. Then one night I logged in to my faithful-but-neglected Yahoo! Messenger, and saw her yellow smiley face in my list. She informed me she was moving to Lawrence to finish her master’s degree. I informed her we should meet.

And so we did. We met shortly thereafter at The Java Break for a little coffee (she had hot cocoa) and chatted. The night went wonderful. I went home that evening and told my roommates “I think this might be the one.”

Here we are seven years later.

The moral of the story? The internet is awesome. Do out and do something incredible with it today.

If you’re looking to build some stamina and get healthy, there’s still time to take advantage of Red Dog’s Dog Days, a free, community workout that happens each year in Lawrence.

I’ve been attending this year and the workouts have been incredible and butt kicking.

As a full-time web guy and full-time husband and dad, I spend a lot of time at a desk in front of the computer and being busy. Thanks to the comforts of modern life, I have the ability to expend very little energy above the bare minimum during my day. While this was suppose to be a charmed life, it really is a curse. Couple a stagnant lifestyle with the typical food temptations everyone goes through, it can be quite damaging to the waistline.

Fortunately, Lawrence’s residents seem to be committed to getting and staying healthy, so there are opportunities around town like Dog Days to get some type of physical activity in. Earlier this year, the LJWorld reported that Douglas County was among the top five healthiest counties in Kansas. A similar, different, study in the same paper last year had DoCo as the 27th healthiest out of Kansas’ 105 counties.

Those are some great numbers. However, there are some sad numbers in those reports as well: a couple of the unhealthiest counties in Kansas – Cherokee and Montgomery – are where my family calls home. Clearly, I have a lot going against me to be as healthy as I’d like to be. But, I’ve done it before and I’m confident I can do it again.

I graduated with a degree in Mass Communications, and then after graduating in December 1999, I moved to Lawrence to write (and design pages) for the World Company’s Eudora News and De Soto Explorer newspapers, in addition to a later stint as a page editor at The Ottawa Herald. Then I got out of the newspaper biz altogether, and not a moment too soon, apparently. That is one hurting industry.

Somewhere along the way, I got interested in web development. When I was first learning web design, I started writing my ramblings on the now-defunct Grubesteak.com (don’t ask about why it was named that; it’s a dumb story). It was all hand coded; those where the days before WordPress and other blogging platforms had become popular. Coding the pages and writing were a bit daunting and eventually I gave up the ghost. I tried another time to get blogging again but then my life got busy with the birth of my first child. And then, I was too busy.

These days, life has settled down a bit. I like to write and I decided to give another stab at it. I’ve been on a creative roll as of late, development more, taking pictures and just overall being more creative.

It’s important, at least for me, to get things out from time to time. I find if I keep things repressed that I’d like to write about, it just comes out in other forms and usually not in anything good.

I really think more people should write and write often.

And so, that’s what this is all about. I’ve lived in Lawrence for a decade now, but it’s only been recently that I’ve come to the acceptance that I’m a Lawrencian. That might sound odd, but I’ve had one foot out the door for years now. I was always going to leave, move away, start anew somewhere else. What happened instead was, a lot of my friends moved away to find work, and I was left behind. I grew my family, established some roots and got involved with the community. Despite some rather glaring faults, I’ve fallen in love with this town all over again.